Highlights

Battery applet now informs what is blocking power savingNew energy usage monitor

Enhanced Power Management

Power management settings can be configured
differently for certain activities

Laptop will not suspend when closing the lid while an external monitor is
connected ('cinema mode', by default, can be turned off)

Power management inhibitions block lock screen too

Screen brightness changes are now animated on most hardware

No longer suspends when closing the lid while shutting down

Support for keyboard button brightness controls on lock screen

KInfoCenter provides statistics about energy consumption

Battery monitor now shows which applications are currently holding a power management
inhibition for example ('Chrome is currently suppressing PM: Playing video')

The new Bluedevil Applet

Better Bluetooth Capabilities

New Bluetooth applet

Bluedevil was ported to a new library from KDE, BluezQt

Added support for blocking and unblocking Bluetooth

Connected devices with Browse Files (ObexFTP) support are now displayed in the file dialog's Places panel

Configure your Touchpad

A touchpad configuration module has been added

Application Menu can access contactsApplication Menu can show recent documents

Improved Plasma Widgets

Clipboard applet gains support for showing barcodes

The Desktop and Folder View containment codebases were
unified, and have seen performance improvements

The Recent Documents and Recent Applications sections in
Application Menu (Kicker) are now powered by KDE activities

Comics widget returns

System monitor plasmoids return, such as CPU Load Monitor and Hard Disk usage

Plasma Media Center - Tech Preview

Plasma Media Center

Plasma Media Center is added as a tech preview in this release. It is fully stable but misses a few features compared to version 1. You can log directly into a Plasma Media Center session if you want to use it on a media device such as a television or projector or you can run it from Plasma Desktop. It will scan for videos, music and pictures on your computer to let you browse and play them.

Plasma is now able to start a nested XWayland server

Big Steps Towards Wayland Support

Plasma 5.3 makes a huge step towards to supporting the Wayland windowing system in addition to the default X11 windowing system. Plasma's window manager and compositor KWin is now able to start a nested XWayland server, which acts as a bridge between the old (X11) and the new (Wayland) world. X11 windows can connect to this server as if it were a normal X server, for KWin it looks like a Wayland window, though. This means that KWin learned to handle Wayland windows in this release, though full integration is only expected for Plasma 5.4.

In addition KWin gained new output modes for Wayland allowing to start a nested KWin on X11 and to start KWin directly on a framebuffer device, which will be the fallback for the case that OpenGL and/or kernel mode settings are not supported. A rendering backend on kernel mode settings is expected for Plasma 5.4. More information about these new backends and how to test them can be found in the KWin wiki pages. Please keep in mind that this is only a development preview and highly experimental new code.

Desktop Tweaks - Press and Hold

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Press and Hold Tweak

A new Tweaks configuration option in Plasma allows you to enable or disable the desktop settings toolbox and enable a new Press and Hold mode for widget management.
In this mode, widgets can be moved after pressing and
holding anywhere on the widget, and the widget handle
will only be shown after press and hold rather than on
hover. When this mode is enabled, unlocking the desktop
will show a helpful instruction notification (which can
be dismissed forever from the popup).

Package Downloads

Source Downloads

You can install Plasma 5 directly from source. KDE's
community wiki has instructions to compile it.
Note that Plasma 5 does not co-install with Plasma 4, you will need
to uninstall older versions or install into a separate prefix.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our Join the Game initiative.

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free
and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among
KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms,
comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of
software titles in many categories including Internet and web
applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and
software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60
languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility
principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on
Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

Trademark Notices.
KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are
registered trademarks of KDE e.V.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and
other countries.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are
the property of their respective owners.